V
The next step is the discussion of the attitude in which we, the white people of the South, stand to the Negro. This attitude is too striking, if not too anomalous, not to have attracted wide attention. A race with an historic and glorious past, in a high stage of civilization, stands confronted by a race of their former slaves, invested with every civil and political right which they themselves possess, and supported by an outside public sentiment, which if not inimical to the dominant race, is at least unsympathetic. The two races cannot be termed with exactness hostile—in many respects, not even unfriendly; but they are suspicious of each other; their interests are in some essential particulars conflicting, and in others may easily be made so; the former slave race has been for over thirty years politically useful to the outsiders by whose sentiment they are sustained, and the former dominant race is unalterably assertive of the imperative necessity that it shall govern the inferior race and not be governed by it.
Now what is the question? Is it merely the question, “whether the Negro shall not have the right to choose his own rulers”; or is it a great race issue between the Negro and the White?
If it is a question of mere perverse imposition by the white on the black, by the stronger on the weaker, a refusal to recognize his just rights, then the advocates of that side are right. If, however, it be the other, then the stronger race should be sustained, or else the people of the North are guilty of the fatuity which destroys nations.
The chief complication of the matter has arisen from the possession of the elective franchise by the newly emancipated Negro, and the peculiar circumstances which surround this possession. The very method of the bestowal of this franchise was pregnant with baleful results. It was given him not as a righteous and reasonable act; not because he was considered capable of exercising the highest function of citizenship: the making of laws, and the execution of laws; not with the philosophic deliberation which should characterize an act by which four millions of new citizens of a distinct and inferior race are suddenly added to the nation; but in heat, in a spirit of revenge, and chiefly because the cabal which then controlled the Republic thought that with the Negro as an ally it could dominate the South and perpetuate its own power. The South, just emerging from the furious struggle of war, physically prostrate, but with its dauntless spirit unbroken, confiding in its own integrity of purpose, and vainly believing that as the Constitution was the ægis under which the North had claimed to fight, the constitutional rights for which it had itself contended would be observed and respected, accepted the emancipation of the Negro, but not unnaturally found itself unwilling, indeed unable, to accept all that this emancipation might import. The North, partly in distrust of the sincerity of even the measure of acceptance which the South avowed; partly in the belief in the minds of a considerable portion of its people that the Negro might thus be elevated, and that he would, at least, be enabled to protect himself; but mainly to govern the intrepid and difficult South, at the instance of the partisan leaders who then directed the destinies of the Republic, struck down constitutional government throughout the South, and restored it only when it had placed it in the Negro’s hands.
No such act of fatuity ever emanated from a nation. Justification it can have none; its best excuse must be that it was accomplished under a certain enthusiasm just after a bitter war, and before passion had cooled sufficiently for reason to reassert her sway. It was a people’s insanity. The “Reconstruction of the South” was, on the part of the people of the North at large, simply that which in national life is worse than a crime, a blunder; on the part of the leaders who planned it and carried it through, it was a cool, deliberate, calculated act, violative of the terms on which the South had surrendered and disbanded her broken armies, and perpetrated for the purpose of securing—not peace, not safety, not righteous acknowledgment of lawfully constituted authority, but personal power to the leaders of the party which at that time was dominant, power with all that it implied of gain and revenge. For this they took eight millions of the Caucasian race, a people which in their devotion and their self-sacrifice, in their transcendent vigor of intellect, their intrepid valor in the field, and their fortitude in defeat, had just elevated their race in the eyes of mankind, and placed them under the domination of their former slaves. There is nothing like it in modern history.
Within two months after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox there was not a Confederate within the limits of the Southern States who had not accepted honestly the status of affairs.
On the 18th of December, 1865, General Grant, who had been sent through the South to inspect and make a report on its condition, in his report to the President said:
“I am satisfied the mass of thinking men in the South accept the present situation of affairs in good faith. The questions which have hitherto divided the sentiment of the people of the two sections—slavery and State-rights, or the right of the State to secede from the Union—they regard as having been settled forever by the highest tribunal, that of arms, that man can resort to.”
Shortly after the assembling of Congress in December, 1865, the President was able to state that the people of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee had reorganized their State governments. The conventions of the seceding States had all repealed or declared null and void the ordinances of secession. The laws were in full operation, and the States were in reality back in the Union, with duly elected representatives, generally men who had been Union men, waiting to be admitted to Congress when it should assemble.[79]
Had Lincoln but been here, how different might have been the story! His wisdom, his sound sense, his catholic spirit, his pride in the restored Union which he had preserved, his patriotism, would have governed. For two years the influence of his views remained too potent to be overcome. Johnson, who had not much love for the South, had caught enough of his liberal and patriotic spirit to attempt the continuance of his pacific, constitutional, and sagacious policy. But he lacked his wisdom, and by the end of two years the dominant will of Thad. Stevens and his lieutenants had sufficiently warped public opinion to bend it to their pleasure and subvert it to their purpose. Thad. Stevens gave the keynote. On the 14th of December, 1865, he said: “According to my judgment they (the insurrectionary States) ought never to be recognized as capable of acting in the Union, or of being counted as valid States, until the Constitution shall have been so amended as to make it what its makers intended, and so as to secure perpetual ascendancy to the party of the Union.”
Charles Sumner was not behind him. He declared in January, 1867, that unless universal suffrage were conferred on all Negroes in the disorganized States, “you will not secure the new allies who are essential to the national cause.”
In pursuance of the scheme of Stevens, in March, 1867, acts were passed by Congress, virtually wiping out the States of Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Florida, and Texas, and dividing the territory into military districts, under military rulers, who were to have absolute power over life, property, and liberty, subject only to the proviso that death sentences should be approved by the President.
When they were again created States, and brought back into the Union, the Whites had been disfranchised, and the Negro had been created a voter, drafted into the Union League, drilled under his carpet-bag officers, and accepted as the new ally through whom was to be secured “the perpetual ascendancy of the party of the Union.”
Lincoln in his wisdom and patriotism had never dreamed of such a thing. His only “suggestion” had been to let in “some of the colored people, ... as, for instance, the very intelligent.”[80]
The history of that period, of the reconstruction period of the South, has never been fully told. It is only beginning to be written.[81] When that history shall be told it will constitute the darkest stain on the record of the American people. The sole excuse which can be pleaded at the bar of posterity, is that the system was inaugurated in a time of excitement which was not short of frenzy.
Ever since the Negro was given the ballot he has, true to his teaching, steadily remained the ally of the party which gave it to him, following its lead with more than the obedience of the slave, and on all issues, in all times, opposing the respectable white element with whom he dwelt with a steadfast habitude which is only explicable on the ground of steadfast purpose. The phenomenon has been too marked to escape observation. The North has drawn from it the not unnatural inference that the Negro is oppressed by the White, and thus at once asserts his independence and attempts to obtain his rights. The South, knowing that he is not oppressed, draws therefrom the juster inference that he naturally, wilfully, and inevitably allies himself against the White simply upon a race line and stands, irrespective of reason, in persistent opposition to all measures which the White advocates.
The North sees in the Negro’s attitude only the proper and laudable aspiration of a citizen and a man; the South detects therein a desire to dominate, a menace to all that the Anglo-American race has effected on this continent, and to the hopes in which that race established this nation.